Key note speech by Mr Ronan Uhel, Head of Spatial Analysis, European Environment Agency, at the 44th International Planning Congress, 20th September 2008, Dalian, China.

A green tax reform is necessary, one that gradually shifts taxes away from labour and investments and towards taxes on pollution and the inefficient use of land, materials and energy.

Ronan Uhel, Head of Spatial Analysis Group at the EEA

Thank you mister Chairman,

I am honoured to stand before you today and am
also sincerely grateful to the organisers and our Chinese hosts for
granting the European Environment Agency the opportunity to address
what appears to be both a fantastic asset and a critical risk for
Europe’s welfare: the organisation of its cities and towns. I hope it
will resonate with the debates that this timely and fascinating
conference has already generated, bringing in experiences and know-how
from across the world.

Ladies and gentlemen,

With its stunning urban landscapes, historical
cities and cultural treasures, Europe remains one of the world’s most
desirable and healthy places to live and the most frequently visited
world-travel destination. Though it stands among the most urbanised
regions on the globe, Europe remains indeed a fascinating and diverse
continent and its people still enjoy access to extensive natural or
semi-natural landscapes.

Yet, in contemplating the way we have
accommodated this marked urbanisation trait of our societies, serious
concerns persist regarding Europe’s urban future, its urban growth
being far from a down turn. From 72% today, around 80 % of Europeans
will be living in urban areas by 2020; in several countries the
proportion will be 90 % or more. Embedded in this development, we all
continue to witness daily rapid, visible and conflicting changes
in land use which are shaping landscapes in cities, as well as around
and between them as never before; today, already, more than a quarter
of the European Union’s territory is negatively impacted by urban land
uptake.

Furthermore, in this modified landscape, a powerful force is now
fully at work: cities are spreading, minimizing the time and distances
between and in-and-out of cities. This expansion is occurring in a
scattered way across Europe, affecting any size of towns and cities; it
is not driven by a growth of population but by changing lifestyles and
consumption patterns as well as very lenient, service-driven planning
policies. This powerful force is commonly termed ‘urban sprawl’, as we
all know either from research interest or city management
responsibility perspectives.

Urban sprawl in Europe

Available evidence demonstrates conclusively that urban sprawl has
accompanied the development of towns and cities across Europe over the
past 50 years: European cities have expanded on average by 78 %,
whereas the population has grown by only 33 %. The dense enclosed
quarters of the compact city model have been replaced by free standing
apartment blocks, semi-detached and detached houses, with more than a
doubling of the space consumed per inhabitant over that period. Trends
towards new low density environments should continue according to
business-as-usual scenarios. On a straight extrapolation of current
practices, a 0.6 % annual increase in urban areas, although apparently
small, would lead to a doubling of the total amount of urban area in a
little over a century. Thus, urban sprawl, which remained an ignored
challenge on a European scale until very recently, is now rightly
regarded as one of the major common and cross-cutting issues facing
Europe. I would assume that such a picture of the European urban
realities will relate to those of the many participants from other
regions of the world, gathered today in Dalian for this important
conference.

I would like to add that just over the past 20 years low density
suburban development in the periphery of Europe's cities has become the
norm, and the expansion of urban areas in many European countries has
increased by over three times the growth of population. Moreover, in
the past 10 years alone, the equivalent of five times the size of Great
London has been given up to further sprawl of our cities; just consider
for a moment that the Council of Great London has calculated the land
and ecological footprint of their city to be equivalent to 293 times
its area – I leave you with completing the arithmetic for the whole of
Europe!

Change in consumption patterns

Suffice to say that today, society’s collective
reliance on land and nature for food, raw materials and waste
absorption results in a resource demand without precedent in history.
Our consumption patterns are completely different throughout Europe
from what they were twenty years ago. Mobility, new types of housing,
communication, tourism and leisure have emerged as major components of
consumption by households in Europe, whose size and composition are
also undergoing profound changes: many more households, smaller in size
with higher consumption rates per individual.

Now that most of the population is living in
urban areas – a factual reality for the whole world since last year -
agricultural land uses and their functions in the countryside have
evolved in order to ensure feeding city populations, fuelling our
cars and troublesome maintenance of depending rural structures and
functions. In this context, our coasts in particular and, to a lesser
degree, our mountains, are being urbanised at an accelerating rate –
for instance, urbanisation of the coast grew about 30 % faster than
inland areas. Resident communities in these areas keep being
transformed to accommodate new economies increasingly intertwined with
the hinterland and principally dependent on tourism and the massive
boom of secondary homes. There is no apparent slowing in these trends,
with the urban areas of the southern, eastern and central parts of
Europe particularly at risk.

In light of all these trends, I would even go as far as to argue
that sprawl now threatens the unique urban culture of Europe, as it
creates severe environmental, social and economic impacts for both the
cities and the countryside of Europe. As a matter of fact, traditional
environmental health problems from unsafe drinking water, inadequate
sanitation and poor housing have largely disappeared from cities across
Europe but the sprawling nature of Europe’s cities is critically
important because of major impacts that are evident in increased
energy, land and soil consumption, that threaten both natural and rural
environments; rising greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change
and elevated air and noise pollution levels that often exceed the
agreed human safety limits - Europe loses 200 million working days a
year to air pollution-related illness alone; not to mention social
inequities associated with such impacts or the economic losses
due to traffic congestion or to the effects of extreme weather
events.

Urban sprawl thus produces many adverse impacts that have direct
effects on the quality of life for people living in cities as well as -
though this fact is not stressed as much as it should be - a patent
uniformitarian approach to shaping and designing urban development in
Europe, resonating as such with growing empirical evidence across other
regions in the world –several presentations that will be given during
the workshop sessions, which I have taken a look at with great
interest, agree wholeheartedly with this.

EU funds’ impact on urban sprawl

With this remark I mean to highlight the fact that global
socio-economic forces interact with more localised environmental and
spatial constraints to generate the common characteristics of urban
sprawl evident throughout Europe today. In essence, through the
realisation of the ‘internal market’, Europe’s new prosperity and
economic development has put pressure on cities. The role and
contribution of cities to Europe’s competitiveness, economic growth and
jobs, while also delivering social and environmental goals, has been
addressed extensively by the European Union’s institutions together
with the regional and local authorities. To this end, considerable
budget transfers from European Cohesion and Structural Funds to member
states provide powerful drivers of macro-economic change to support
European integration, but analysis shows that they also craft
inadvertent socio-economic effects that have promoted the development
of urban sprawl.

This is why the co-ordination of land use policies and Structural
and Cohesion Fund investments remains crucial to support the
containment of urban sprawl in Europe. Practically, this is complicated
by the fact that central European interventions in many others, if not
all, policy domains, impact on or are impacted by urban development.
One obvious –and critical- illustration of the extent of these
interrelationships is the European Union’s commitment to sustainable
development and policies to tackle climate change: how can we ensure
that the growth of urban greenhouse gas emissions due to the
ever-increasing dominance of car transport in European sprawling cities
does not threaten to undermine the European Union’s Kyoto commitment to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2020? Illustrative of this complex
problem is a straight projection that vehicle-kilometres travelled in
urban areas by road can rise by up to 40 % in 2030 compared to 1995
levels, forcefully raising the question of our societal model of
mobility.

Undoubtedly, urban sprawl in Europe has accelerated in response to
improved transportation links and enhanced personal mobility that has
made it possible either to live increasingly far from city centers
while retaining all the advantages of a city location, or to enable
personal choices to live in one city and work in another; this reflects
social values that place great emphasis on individual achievements
rather than on group solidarity. It is a well-established fact that
economic development and the marginalisation of land by consequent
urban development generates the need for new transport infrastructures
to link them together, which in turn, clearly, produces more mobility
and additional costs to society. The mix of driving forces include both
micro and macro socio-economic trends such as the means of
transportation, the price of land, individual housing preferences,
demographic trends, cultural traditions and constraints, the
attractiveness of existing urban areas, mono-centre urban visions and,
not least, the application of land use planning policies at both local
and regional scales.

Agricultural land prices are extremely low

In this context, another well-established fact, and an important
factor underlying urban sprawl, is the extremely low price of
agricultural land -in most cases highly productive agricultural land -
compared to already urbanised land such as brownfield sites or former
industrial sites. In many development projects, the cost of
agricultural land acquisition is relatively low and enables better
profits to be realised than for already urban land or the use of former
industrial waste land, even if no remediation is needed. This factor is
particularly imperative in the economic heart of Europe stretching from
the United Kingdom down through the Benelux countries, Germany and
France. The trend of good agricultural land being deliberately and
artificially maintained at a low value is reinforced by the broad use
of expropriation tools. A direct side effect of these combined tools —
low value, future use not taken into account, and expropriation — is
clearly demonstrated by the development of villages near cities, for
residential or business purposes.

Planning at the heart of the solution

Managing cities is certainly a complex and interrelated task which
highlights the potential dangers of ad-hoc decision making: the
solution to one problem, at one scale, is often the cause of another,
at a similar or different scale. However, overall, evidence highlights
that where unplanned, decentralised development dominates, sprawl will
occur, in a mechanistic way; conversely, where growth around the
periphery of the city is coordinated by strong urban policy, more
compact forms of urban development can be secured. It is therefore of
prime importance to recognise that while the city is the main focus of
socio-economic activity, and the associated pressures and impacts on
the environment, it cannot be managed in isolation from forces and
decisions that originate well beyond the city borders. As a result,
there is now increasing awareness of the benefits of considering urban
territory as an integrated unit for stimulating better coordination of
policies and analysis of their economic, social and environmental
impacts.

But as you might have gathered, most of the current discussions and
policies are driven by the needs of today’s economy rather than the
environmental realities of our situation. Being pragmatic, many
environmentalists, wishing to see improvements or changes in urban
policies and practices, have hooked up their arguments to the climate
change and energy bandwagon, opting to use reductions in the use of
fossil fuels as their cause célèbre to achieve a greener way of life.
Critics would say that this was forcing us into doing the right deeds
for the wrong reasons. But, I believe that this would be wrong.
Reliable scientific arguments exist for shaping urban sustainability
around the spine of environment quality and ecosystem services rather
than simply based on meeting energy and transport demands.

To this effect, we are more and more often confronted with long term
problems for which the outcomes are highly uncertain. Making sense in a
complex world requires that we separate straightforward problems that
can be solved through exchange of best practices, complicated ones
where good practice helps, complex problems where practices are
emerging and problems borne out of chaotic systems where novel
practices are needed. If we want to seriously address the
sustainability of our consumption and production we need to recognise
uncertainties about the future, go beyond the short timescales of
current policies and change our current preoccupation with working on
many separate issues. We need to develop policies that reflect the
complexity of the systems we are dealing with, so that we can address
the needs of today’s disenfranchised as well as those of future
generations.

This is particularly true with regard to the substantial financial
flows that shape planning budgets. At present, urban planning policies
often reflect the logic of the market. They should rather reflect a
vision of urban development, in which environmental and social
considerations are fully embedded in spatial planning policies at all
steps of the policy cycle from problem identification and policy design
through to the implementation and ex-post evaluation stages. This could
have several benefits, including cross-compliance to legislations,
redressing the market failures that drive sprawl by acting on price
signals for land, in, around and between urban areas. Such realisations
are demonstrated throughout the effective approaches undertaken by some
cities in Europe.

The fact is that despite the complexity of urban
systems, a piecemeal approach to urban management still prevails in
many cities; sprawl is seldom tackled as an integrated issue. In turn,
issue integration is rarely matched by procedural integration through
policy-making, problem analysis and impact assessment, planning,
financing and implementation, precisely because of the wide scope of
the issues involved. Surely, this constraint on effective urban
management stands high on political agendas - though I must add that
this was already identified as far back as the 1980s. Why does this
lack of effective implementation still persist then?

I would respond, only partly though, that there is a continuing
managerial perception of cities as isolated from their wider regional
context. In reality, however, the functional influences of cities are
recognised to reach far beyond their immediate boundaries. There are
also multidimensional links between urban and rural areas that are
becoming more and more apparent. Typically, in Europe today, cities
flow imperceptibly across municipal boundaries, a process that is at
different stages of development in different countries, but which
occurs everywhere. But, at the same time, the responsibility for land
use management remains divided between different administrations, and
this fragmentation of management, frequently exacerbated by the
political tensions of neighbouring administrations, leads to incoherent
and uncoordinated land use management.

Therefore, urban policies that increase the efficiency of land use,
energy and material play an important role in reducing the urban
footprint –I am not afraid of making understatements, as you can hear!
But we have to bear in mind that rising consumption often outweighs
efficiency improvements. For example, despite the fact that the average
fuel consumption per car in Europe has decreased by 10 % due to
technical improvements since 1990, the overall fuel consumption by cars
in the same period increased by 20 %, mainly because more and more
people own a car and the number of kilometres travelled increased. It
remains a hard fact that many consumers simply prefer larger and less
fuel-efficient cars –and eco-labelling and other purely voluntary
instruments alone are unlikely to reverse these trends. In Germany,
without measures to reduce transport pollution, the volume of traffic
and related economic growth would have to have been 90 % less than
what it is today! In other words, environmental measures liberate the
economy to grow faster than it could without such measures, partly
because the population would not have tolerated the pollution from
untrammeled growth.

Europe’s reliance on other regions’
resources

However, Europe is only a player in our globalised world. The truth
is that Urban Europe, if I may use this expression, relies not only on
its own resources but to a large extent on the resources from other
parts of the world. Our emissions – for example of greenhouse gases and
persistent chemicals – affect not only Europe’s environment but the
global environment. The widely cited indicator of the ecological
footprint shows in an easily understandable way that the footprint of
the EU is larger than our bio-capacity; I gave you earlier a vivid
illustration of this point with the case of Greater London. I could
have pointed at the issue of waste management as well, considering that
from 2005 to 2020, the amount of municipal waste in Europe is expected
to grow by a quarter, part of which, electronic waste mainly, being
shipped to India.

So it is time for change, a rallying sign of many conferences like
the one assembling us today -Time to redesign the way we live, consume
and produce in Urban Europe. In particular, we need action to address
the three urban-related consumption areas that have been identified as
having the highest environmental impacts during their lifecycle:
housing, food and drink, and private transport which, all together, are
responsible for about 65% of material use and 70% of global warming
potential. This is a huge challenge as we would like to continue to
have a good quality of life in the 2030s – a human well-being based on
secure access to clean water and air, healthy food and without
dangerous climate change, to mobility and decent housing, with equity
in access to education and social security. And without exporting our
problems to the detriment of the quality of life in other regions of
the world, or causing irreversible changes or loss of the provisioning,
regulating, supporting and cultural services from ecosystems.

Moving towards a common vision

To be on the right path towards this vision, we know that we must
substantially improve the efficiency of our energy, material and land
use and to reduce emissions of both greenhouse gases and pollutants.
Such changes have to be accompanied by a shift in our consumer model.
One proposal is to gradually move from a society of assets and
ownership of goods to one where access to services is the driver.
Long-life products and urban settings where at least most trips can be
made by public transport rather than cars could help deliver this part
of the vision. Thus, there is a need for more research on societal
drivers of change as consumers across Europe are also increasingly
showing their willingness to move towards more sustainable and low
carbon consumption - but they need the right information and the right
price signals. This is why a green tax reform is necessary, one that
gradually shifts taxes away from labour and investments and towards
taxes on pollution and the inefficient use of materials and energy.

One example of how to look at this is the Intervention Diamond,
developed by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in
the United Kingdom. Made up of four action areas - the four E’s -
enable, engage, exemplify, and encourage - it can be used to catalyse
an integrated approach which can evolve as attitudes and behaviours
change over time. Ideas like these, and conferences like this, are what
is needed to ensure the necessary research and social acceptance and
adoption of the goal of, and pathways to, sustainable urban development
and, hopefully, a post-carbon society. When communities have a shared
mental model of core values and basic principles that define meaningful
and dignified goals, experience shows us that it is possible to prevent
diversity from compromising decisiveness, leadership from compromising
subsidiarity, the short term from compromising the long term, and
self-interests from compromising the common good.

Indeed, seemingly contradictory aspects can be made mutually
supportive. But the benefits do not come free; in order to overcome
many of the obvious urban problems we must develop and share a set of
basic principles that are scientifically verifiable and can be endorsed
across cultures, that are generic for all scales and fields of
activities, are practical enough for scrutinising today's situation, as
well as of proposed solutions and visions that are sufficient for the
development of integrated indicators and tools to monitor complex and
inter-related transitions.

We must find ways of creating public visibility for such principles
- always more difficult than for concrete actions. We need to find a
calm area of entry - the opposite of a crisis-generating tipping point
- for sharing and experiencing such principles at a time when haste
seems inherent in our society. Perhaps these requirements are
overwhelming, forcing us towards a more diffuse and ad-hoc approach.
But experience tells us that without a shared framework of robust
principles, sustainable development will remain a sidecar to other
goals.

Typically, urban sustainability is dealt with through defensive
terms: 'doing as little harm as possible', ‘minimizing impacts' and 'we
require more research to be more proactive than this'. In this world,
phrases such as 'wasting resources is like pouring money down the
drain' and 'eco-efficiency' are of limited use. Worse still,
maintaining the reactive, ad-hoc approach characteristic of today means
that we are failing to do four things: first, to recognise the very
real dangers of extrapolating our current unsustainable course into the
future; second, to plan with reference to the future rather than the
past; third, to look at investments as strategic platforms for further
improvements; and, fourth, to regard the economy as a means to reach
dignified goals for overall well-being rather than as a goal in
itself.

Sustainable development: Question of life and
death

The renewed recognition of urban sustainability, or I should say the
contribution of cities to sustainable development, is genuinely a
matter of life and death. As shown by the European Science
Foundation-funded work on social inequalities in health, once the
basics of food and shelter have been provided, it is the presence of
social cohesion together with a shared model of society that
overwhelmingly leads to higher life expectancies, rather than absolute
levels of gross domestic product. This is evidenced in Japan and even
within Europe, where it can be linked to cohesion amongst policies.

On the verge of concluding my speech, I hope that I have managed to
present some evidence and argumentation that will hopefully resonate
with you in demonstrating that the problem of unsustainability of our
urban societies is not simply about a series of negative impacts, but
more about underlying systemic errors in societal design that makes
things worse and worse.

The fundamental challenge remains indeed understanding in both
functional and operational terms, the unsustainable development
patterns of our sprawling cities, so that future unsustainable
development can be corrected or avoided. All things considered, the
paradigm of the compact city, as an immediate antidote to the sprawling
city, still cannot be fully substantiated. The effectiveness of
compaction, as well as centralisation and concentration, have been
thoroughly examined, including the various ways in which compaction can
be achieve including intensification, new high-density development,
traditional neighbourhood development etc. However, there are still
uncertainties, particularly in the areas of ecological, social and
economic impacts. In this context, the relationship between urban
compactness and mobility is central to the debate. But there are more
dimensions, for example, to the simple causal relationship between
high-density development and reductions in mobility demand. Current
monitoring and analysis of such links could be improved greatly if
employment catchment areas were used to define functional urban
regions, a proposal initiated by the President of ISOCARP, M. Pierre
Laconte.

Ladies and gentleman,

We need to regain a sense of humility when facing the natural
reality – and not a virtual perception - of our urbanised world. As
traditional peoples have come to understand, in the end it is nature
that we must confront. We now understand that it is the
multi-dimensional, integrated form of the pressures that give rise to
most concern, for it is through this that the loss of Xiao kung - the
Chinese sense of completeness- and greenlash - the sudden loss of
ecological diversity - are likely to occur generally with limited
notice.

For years and decades, the impacts of urban sprawl have generated
debates among scientists and practitioners, less so among the
authorities and our leaders. I hope, humbly but forcefully, that
together, we will contribute to raising further awareness and provoking
reactions to an issue that is crucial to our societies’ resilience.

I thank you for your attention and wish you a rich and productive
event.